Due to a supposed shortage of tower defense games on iOS (I’m not personally an expert on the statistics of genres of the games on the App Store), Sabaton Games thought it prudent to create the recently released Aspects TD. So, has Sabaton Games developed the experience one should expect from a tower defense game on the iOS? I suppose the answer would be yes, but at the same time, no.

Aspects TD is a little bit different from most tower defense games I’ve played. Most of my genre experience comes from the fantastic PixelJunk Monsters, as well as many StarCraft (the first one) Use Map Settings games, among other games I can’t particularly remember. The most unique thing about Aspects TD is certainly being able to essentially “combat” against an opponent. More than just defending your base with towers known as Totems, you are assaulting your enemy’s base with your OWN monsters known as “Phantoms.” Monster waves are sent to each player at the same time, from what I can tell, and you’ll have to be able to time your summoning of extra Phantoms at the right moment to throw a kink in your opponent’s tower coverage in hopes to get some of your Phantoms across the map and through to the opponent’s base.

This game-play design forces a balance. Either build more Totems to defend or summon Phantoms to attack your opponent. You automatically gain a resource called “Mana” every time one of your Totems kills an enemy Phantom. When you summon your own Phantom, you begin to gain Mana from something called “Faith.” You gain more Faith by summoning Phantoms — 10% of their cost goes into this Faith pool. Every ten seconds or so from the time you summon your first Phantom, you will begin to gain Mana equal to the number of your Faith in addition to what your Towers gain from killing monsters. This process continues until the end of the match, and your Faith number will grow as long as you summon more Phantoms.

Depending on how well you do at placing your Totems, you may be able to be more economical and send more Phantoms out against your opponent and gain resources over time. The investment can build up into something worthwhile, but depending on what kind of enemies end up being sent at you, you can definitely use that extra 1000 mana to build more Totems rather than waiting for the long-term interest on your investment. Unfortunately, the game does not reward you for being truly economical with your Mana — you don’t see the typical percentage gain of resources based on what you have pooled. This can create the issue of needing to keep your Mana at near 0 or you will run the risk of possibly being behind in either defense or attacking. If you choose to spend on attacking, your Faith will grow to almost ridiculous levels and you won’t have enough time to use it on building more Totems or attacking. But at that point, you’ll probably be able to overwhelm your enemy with a ton of Phantoms — so that isn’t a big deal, per se.

On top of the prior circumstances, due to the mishmash of enemies each wave, you can’t really construct a strategy other than hopefully having enough damage to get through each progressive wave. Phantom waves are not usually themed, such as “flying only” or “this type of enemy only” so it can be hard to plan for all contingencies at all times. Each wave increases difficulty of killing the monsters, because your Totems do not grow in strength and your enemies get more health. The tuning in this regard seems very exact and they don’t really give much leeway in exploring the use of different totems in different places. Totems cost a lot and there’s not a huge diversity, not to mention they can’t be upgraded at all. It feels like they were going for more of a Plants vs. Zombies feel more than a traditional tower defense game in some aspects, but in the end after trying a lot you can get through most of the fights just by trying to perfect your strategy as much as possible. Overall, the game tends to just be super fucking hard and you can get the feeling you are relying on luck to get past the challenges rather than actual strategy.

Your profile will have experience gain, but for what purpose, I couldn’t tell you. I can only assume that your Phantoms/Totems gain power as you “level up” but that means you have to lose several games before you gain enough power to actually beat a mission you might be having trouble with. There is no indication of actually increasing your power through these levels, since when you level, there is nothing that tells you what you’ve gained. Even if you notice that some of the numbers in your profile change, whether or not they are large enough to affect anything is left to question.

As you play the game, you’ll notice that numbers fly all over the place signifying how much damage your Totems are doing. These numbers are useless, and clutter up the screen, not to mention they are absolutely redundant since there are also health bars — which can’t be seen because they are hidden behind all the numbers! There is wayyyy too much information and it is to the detriment of the visuals of the game. The satisfying aspect should be seeing the damage you do to your enemies, not the damage numbers covering up the actual visuals. Health bars are more than enough to gauge if an enemy is going to die, and should be all that is needed.

Controls are a whole other issue with this game. For one, the squares are way too small. I don’t know how much of an issue this would be on an iPad, but since they opt for a “tap and drag” interface rather than something that is more natural for a touch screen, it can be quite cumbersome to place your tower somewhere you actually didn’t want it to go or on a square you aren’t able to build on. A more natural option would have been tapping an existing square on the board and then choosing the Totem you want to make from there. The same is true with the Phantoms — you are “tapping and flicking” them upwards when really all you should have to be forced to do is tap them. The User Interface can be cleaned up considerably if they put a little more effort into those systems.

Lag can also be an issue — when you have a ton of Totems and a ton of Phantoms going around on your opponent’s map, numbers are flying everywhere, shit is blowing up, and you are left with a game dropping down to four frames per second. This goes to the root of the issue where the words “less is more” comes to mind. It may have been a more pleasant experience to be able to place less Totems on the board in a more strategic fashion, with less enemies, and less stupid numbers flying all over the place. Not to say that you can’t have a game that is designed like Aspects TD is currently — just that there are some things you can do to prevent a clumsy game-play experience that chugs at a low frame rate when too much is happening.

The character art in the game is pretty cool — but the actual game-play art is below what you may have expected at first glance. The “Phantoms” pretty much all look like crap, but some of the Totems look very cool. The totems have this weird sci-fi shamanistic thing going on — think Avatar, I guess. There’s no real explanation as to why Totems launch missiles and shoot lasers or flames, but at least they look cool doing it. This leads into the story itself. The story is actually very interesting in the beginning and I was very hopeful for what the game would have in store. I had been putting a lot of effort into this game since it was so freaking hard, but it came to be my extreme disappointment that the story completely fell off and most of the missions became something like “Oh, I have to defend my people” and “Oh, there’s bad guys over there, but whatever I’m going to go and kill them.” The story had started with some sort of conspiracy thing and mystery as to where the evil forces were coming from. Also, I was hopeful that the technology would be explained somehow to add more layers to the story. But they never really propel that story forward by the time you’re on the 19th mission, which is the currently last mission available. Not to mention, the 19th mission also feels like it is rigged against you and unless you grind some levels, I don’t see how its possible to beat the mission at all.

According to the game, there are more missions “coming soon.” It is kind of weird, because the whole way through, you’re “unlocking” more Phantoms and Totems — even in the last available level! Like, for what purpose am I still unlocking things on the last level? Is there a time where I actually get to play the full game with all of the options available? Apparently not. At least, in this current version of the game. This isn’t a “free to play” style game in which you expand your options or buy more missions. By saying there are missions “coming soon” it is essentially saying that you are buying an incomplete game. It’s nice to have an update to look forward to, but when you’re playing a game you outright bought and you get to the end of the game and you haven’t actually started to use all of the skills you learned about during the progression, you can feel cheated. It feels almost like the game is too hard on purpose, just to elongate the amount of time you have to spend on the game to get to the last mission, with the last mission being practically unbeatable. There is also no information regarding when “soon” is or how many missions are to be expected.

There are three different characters to choose from… but you can only save the progression of two separate characters. Each of the three characters have their own perks, and special totems. But as you might expect, the story is the same for all of the characters. I am unsure why you can’t have one save slot for each character, but it’s not like it really matters that much since the game is essentially the same between them. Save slots don’t even seem very useful at all in this game, since you can go back and play any mission at any time. It only seems to serve as restricting you from switching characters on the fly and to keep your “levels” contained to only one of the characters.

Oddities arise with the game as well — you will see the occasional bad spelling error or a grammatically incorrect phrase. I think there also might be a tower that has had its description switched with another tower, but I can’t be too sure there. Considering there isn’t a whole lot to actually read in the game, it is fairly rare throughout the experience where you’ll encounter these bizarre errors. Sound is another issue with the game, which is easily solved (hint hint). The music is repetitive and the sound effects are just annoying. While I can agree that the music is nice to listen to maybe one or two times, there doesn’t appear to be any variety at all — they keep playing the same song over and over. Sound effects can be really annoying if they are not used correctly, but like many other games you may play on your iOS device, it’s better to just turn off the sound. The game has been stable, and except for the massive frame drops when there is a ton happening, there is only one consistent crashing problem. When you lose, if you press “Next” the game will just quit completely and you will have to boot up the game again to replay the level. To prevent having this happen, you have to tap “Skip” and then replay the mission. I have no idea what “Next” is supposed to do if it was actually meant to work. It’s almost like the game is saying “You suck, you shouldn’t play this game anymore, so let me quit the game for you. See ya later asshole!”

Currently the game is $1.99 for a release sale, but will go up to $2.99 once the promotional period is over. Two dollars is definitely not a lot of money, but in the case of this game it might be worth it if you’re really into seeing a different tower defense game, or if you absolutely need something like this on your iOS devices. Multiplayer is a feature in the game, but can only be played locally, so if you want to take advantage of that feature, you’ll have to convince another friend to pay their two (or three) dollars to get into the game, as well. I suppose that the multiplayer aspect might actually be “the thing you were meant to do” with this game, but considering Tower Defense is a niche genre already, you’re not going to find someone to play this with unless you make them buy it.